The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for the quantitative analysis of the ingredients of beer and/or wort, the individual ingredients, namely alcohol, extract or wort and dissolved carbon dioxide being determined individually.
The state of the art of beer manufacturing may be ascertained by reference to the Kirk-Othmer, "Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology," Second Edition, vol. 3 (1964), pp. 297-338 under the section Beer and Brewing, particularly pp. 314-320 where fermentation is disclosed, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein.
In one known method of analysis of beer ingredients, the alcohol and extract determination is obtained using a refractometer. This is done by determining the various indices of refraction and by recording the density measurements. These two values provide the percentages of the ingredients. To determine the carbon dioxide content, the beer is placed in a vacuum and the carbon dioxide is measured on the basis of the degassing which takes place.
This prior art method suffers from the drawback that it is quite complex and in general it can be carried out only in the laboratory or under similar conditions. Furthermore, this prior art method is quite inaccurate because the boundary conditions such as fluctuations in pressure and temperature enter into the measured values and affect them. Lastly this known method suffers also from the drawback that it allows no in-line measurements.